Keep up with Lauren as she serves a mission in Tempe, Arizona for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Monday, January 14, 2013

Monday, January 14, 2013

Hiya Family!

On Saturday, January 12th, Katie was baptized and then confirmed on Sunday. She's 10 years old and her mom just started coming back to church. So they're doing well. I participated by giving the closing prayer. It was a great baptism and I'm so happy the ward came out and supported her. Having a baptism every week so far this January has been a wonderful start for the New Year.

We now have three investigators. I'm thinking that we will have more by the end of this coming week since many people couldn't meet last week, but set up appointments for this week. We called all of our former investigators that hadn't been contacted in the past three months and our potentials and tried to set up appointments. We also went and knocked on their doors. It's been quite a week. Mathi is still progressing and we taught him part of the Plan of Salvation and hope to take him to the visitor's center this week. Actually that day when we had his lesson was a little crazy. We had 3 lessons at the same time, so we had to organize splits. Sister Farthing went to Mathi's lesson. I went to Katie's last lesson before her baptism and then to Michael's lesson. This was all in a 30 minute period. Each lesson that I taught was 15 minutes and I literally had to run from the next appointment to the next. I also had different fellowships at each of the lessons, so it was like a hand off. lol. After both of my lessons were complete, I went to Mathi's house where we finished up the lesson there. Michael was a new investigator that we have finally been able to meet with. He had cancelled his lesson that we had set up for that day like 2 hours before, so we tried to find a time that we could quickly come by and it happened to be when the other lessons were. At least we're teaching him now! Rowena is also one of our new investigators who she was a potential that we've been trying to get a hold of for a while. We also received a mormon.org referral during church and we're going to see the family today and hopefully be able to teach them. Also a family of four, William, a really nice lady named Rashada, and the others that we will find this week.

I know that the 7 elect investigators are out there and that we're starting to see the fruits of our labors. Apparently the entire stake is at a standstill as well. It isn't just our area. It seems like this past week was just preparing the "soil" for the next coming weeks. I'm beginning to learn how difficult our area is compared to other areas in our mission. I guess that the Tempe mission is the highest baptizing mission in Northern America apart from Utah. The richer areas are more closed than the poorer and the Spanish areas. I take the challenge. I know that this area has so much potential and I'm excited to be apart of it. :) We had a man in his talk yesterday encourage the members to talk to people and then give them over to us to teach. That was pretty neat- a shout out to us from the pulpit! Yeah! I'm looking forward with faith for this coming week and what it will bring.